Announcing NetBSD 2.1

Introduction

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release
2.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available.

About NetBSD 2.1

NetBSD 2.1 is the first maintenance release of the
netbsd-2 release branch.
This release provides numerous functional enhancements, including
support for many new devices, hundreds of bug fixes, patches
and updates to kernel subsystems, and many enhancements to the
user environment. In addition, all of the security fixes and
critical bug fixes from the NetBSD 2.0.3 update are included as
well.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 2.1 are available
for download at many sites around the world. A list of download
sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services is
provided at the end of this announcement; the latest list of
available download sites may also be found at:

We encourage users who wish to install via a CD-ROM ISO
image to download via BitTorrent by using the
torrent
files supplied in the ISO image area. BitTorrent has
recently been added to the list of distribution mechanisms and
its use is strongly encouraged to help keep bandwidth
available.

About NetBSD

The NetBSD operating system is a full-featured, open
source, UNIX-like operating system descended from the Berkeley
Networking Release 2 (Net/2), 4.4BSD-Lite, and 4.4BSD-Lite2.
NetBSD runs on 54 different system architectures featuring 17
machine architectures across 17 distinct CPU families, and is
being ported to more. The NetBSD 2.1 release contains complete
binary releases for 48 different machine types.

NetBSD is a highly integrated system. In addition to its
highly portable, high performance kernel, NetBSD features a
complete set of user utilities, compilers for several
languages, the X Window System, firewall software and numerous
other tools, all accompanied by full source code. The NetBSD
Packages Collection contains over 5500 packages and binary
package releases for a number of platforms are currently in
progress.

More information on the goals of the NetBSD Project can
be procured from the NetBSD web site at:

NetBSD is free. All of the code is under non-restrictive
licenses, and may be used without paying royalties to anyone.
Free support services are available via our mailing lists and
web site. Commercial support is available from a variety of
sources; some are listed at:

NetBSD is the work of a diverse group of people spread
around the world. The
“Net” in our name is a tribute to the Internet,
which enables us to communicate and share code, and without
which the project would not exist.

Major Changes Between 2.0 and 2.1

The complete list of changes can be found in the
CHANGES-2.1 file in the top level directory of the
NetBSD 2.1 release tree.

The following major changes were made between 2.0 and
2.1:

Kernel

Fix a bug that caused spontaneous reboot under
heavy load on SH3/4 platforms.

Acknowledgments

The NetBSD Foundation would like to thank all those who
have contributed code, hardware, documentation, funds,
colocation for our servers, web pages and other documentation,
release engineering, and other resources over the years. More
information on the people who make NetBSD happen is available
at:

We would like to especially thank the University of
California at Berkeley and the GNU Project for particularly
large subsets of code that we use. We would also like to thank
the Internet Systems Consortium and the Helsinki University of
Technology for current colocation services.

About the NetBSD Foundation

The NetBSD Foundation was chartered in 1995, with the
task of overseeing core NetBSD project services, promoting the
project within industry and the open source community, and
holding intellectual property rights on much of the NetBSD code
base. Day-to-day operations of the project are handled by
volunteers.

As a non-profit organisation with no commercial backing,
The NetBSD Foundation depends on donations from its users, and
we would like to ask you to consider making a donation to the
NetBSD Foundation in support of continuing production of our
fine operating system.

Donations can be done via PayPal
(<paypal@NetBSD.org>) and are fully tax-deductible
in the US. If you would prefer not to use PayPal, or would like
to make other arrangements, please contact
<finance-exec@NetBSD.org>.